If you look in the dictionary under “rock’n’roll”, you’ll find a picture of Paul McCartney. Yup. With a big black line through it. Macca is possibly the least rock’n’roll person on the Planet, man. Rock’n’roll should be down’n’dirty. Macca deals in light-and-frothy. Rock’n’rollers should be mean and menacing. Macca is music-hall. His ideal instrument would be the banjo, not the bass.

But he remains fascinating for in terms of issues around certain core components of his life-journey. For the size and longevity of his fame. That’s one component. For the rumours of his several illegitimate offspring. That’s another. Philip Norman engages issues around this toxically tantalizing topic in terms of chapter five:

“Boys will be boys!” Brian [Epstein] would say with a camp, self-satirizing sigh when news came to him that another girl was claiming that one of the Beatles was the father of her infant child. Sometimes Brian could quickly prove that the girl was mistaken or lying, but sometimes he would have to write a cheque or find some other way of keeping the girl’s family quiet and his beloved boys out of the headlines. […] Most of the claims were directed at Paul, who cut a swathe through the young female fans of the Beatles with his good looks and easy charm. “Paul would have the fun, then Brian would have to clean up the mess,” as an anonymous member of Beatles’ circle would later put it. Perhaps the worst mess of all was that of the Bootle girl, said to be of gipsy heritage, who turned up at Brian’s office with her young son and claimed that Paul was his father.

As the same anonymous informant told me: “Brian took one look at the child and realized that she must be telling the truth, because he was an angelic-looking kid who must have been the dead spit of Paul at the same age.” But the girl wasn’t after money or marriage, like so many of those who had preceded her and would follow: as a fanatical Beatles fan, what she wanted more than anything else in the world was for Paul to write a song just for her. Not only that: she wanted to be the only one to ever hear it. As the price of her silence, she demanded that a song be written and recorded by Paul entirely in secret, then passed to her as a unique single — the only one of its kind in existence anywhere. Brian was forced to agree and persuaded a reluctant Paul that he had to comply with the girl’s wishes.

Or so the story goes. If it is true, then a lost McCartney classic may still be out there, unheard by all the world except for a single gypsy girl and perhaps her family. What would that rumoured single be worth if it were put up for auction today? Even a song of average quality might fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds; if it matched the quality of “Yesterday” or “Michelle”, the sky would be the limit. But of course there would be a legal minefield to tread, because Paul himself would certainly lay claim to the song and any profits to be made from it. For all we can say at the moment, however, the rumours of the Lost Single are either untrue or the gipsy girl prefers to keep the song just for herself.

Is the song out there? Does the Gipsy girl still listen to it? Has she ever let her son in on the secret? Does he know that he has a Moppa-Toppa Poppa? Esoteric questions for feral folk.

A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, Anthony Burgess, edited and with an introduction by Andrew Biswell (Heinemann 2012)

Like a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange should be read for the first time as a battered old paperback. That’s the best way to feel the power of the words, to experience black print on white paper conjuring a world of action, excitement and ideas. When you read A Clockwork Orange for the first time, it shouldn’t have a glossary, an introduction or any references to the film. It should fly in your mind unaided, fuelled on nothing but Burgess’s invention, imagination and jet-black humour.

That’s why this “Fiftieth Anniversary” edition is not the best way to read A Clockwork Orange for the first time. It’s an expensive hardback whose cover refers to the film straight away. There are many more references to the film in the “Essays, Articles and Reviews” included as an appendix inside, accompanied by a glossary, an introduction and notes by Burgess’s biographer Andrew Biswell, a foreword by Martin Amis, early reviews by Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Ricks, various pieces by Burgess himself exploring the roots of and reactions to his book, including discussion of his own musical version, and an afterword by Stanley Edgar Hyman from “the first American edition” in 1963. Not good, my bratties, for a first-time reader. Especially the glossary. As Burgess himself points out in one of the essays: part of the point of A Clockwork Orange is that it brainwashes its readers into learning an elementary Russian vocabulary, in a subtler and milder echo of the brainwashing that the book’s hero Alex undergoes as part of his rehabilitation.

I hadn’t seen that parallel before, so the essay was worth reading. So was everything else, apart from the glossary of Nadsat, the teen-speak created by Burgess for the anti-hero and his droogies. Okay, the glossary had to be there, as part of the full academic package, but if it had to be there it should have gone further, giving full etymologies for all the words. Stanley Edgar Hyman gets one of those etymologies wrong in the afterword, suggesting that rozz, meaning “police”, comes from Russian рожа, rozha, meaning “to grimace”. Not so. “Rozzer” was English slang for a policeman long before A Clockwork Orange was written. Nadsat both imported Russian and adapted English, and Burgess based the ultra-modern Alex on the Teddy Boys of the 1950s. British readers spotted those local ingredients easily for decades after the book’s first publication in 1962.

But it’s less easy now and this expanded edition makes one important point in both a literary and a literal way. A Clockwork Orange is bigger now than it was in 1962. It became a cult, it influenced many other writers, and it’s now Burgess’s most famous book by far. And it was also, of course, made into an iconic film by Stanley Kubrick. I’ve never seen the film and don’t want to. I think literature and language are much more interesting and important than film. So did Burgess and you can pick up some of his resentment about the film here. He called it “a highly coloured and explicit film” in 1982 (“A Last Word on Violence”, pg. 305). And he later expanded Nadsat by adding the word zubrick, meaning “penis”, apparently from Arabic, and rhyming with Kubrick. But I felt resentment towards Burgess himself, because he disappointed me in this book. I had assumed that he was taking the piss of the Guardian-reading community when he put a keyly core Guardianista phrase into the mouth of P.R. Deltoid, Alex’s “Post-Corrective Adviser”:

“Wrong?” he said, very skorry and sly, sort of hunched looking at me but still rocking away. Then he caught sight of an advert in the gazetta, which was on the table – a lovely smecking young ptitsa with her groodies hanging out to advertise, my brothers, the Glories of the Jugoslav Beaches. Then, after sort of eating her up in two swallows, he said: “Why should you think in terms of there being anything wrong? Have you been doing something you shouldn’t, yes?” (ch. 4)

That “in terms of” is pretentious and redundant, as Burgess must have been aware. But what is Burgess himself using in something he wrote for the Listener in 1972?

The fact remains, however, that the film sprang out of a book, and some of the controversy which has begun to attach to the film is controversy in which I, inevitably, feel myself involved. In terms of philosophy and even theology, the Kubrick Orange is a fruit from my tree. (“Clockwork Marmalade”, pg. 245, reprinted from the Listener, 17th February 1972)

That use of “in terms of” isn’t as bad as P.R. Deltoid’s, but Burgess would have been better writing “In philosophy and even theology” or “In its philosophy…” That would have been more vigorous and direct, and so more in keeping with the vigour and directness of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a very clever and funny book and although you should definitely not read it for the first time in this edition, reading it here for the fourth or fifth time would be good. Inter alia, you even get a reproduction of parts of Burgess’s “1961 typescript”, with doodles and alterations. For example, Burgess changed “the dimmest of us four” in chapter one to “the dimmest of we four”. It’s a small but significant change in one of the best books ever written, though not one of the greatest, in my opinion. I haven’t reviewed it properly above, but here’s a badly flawed review of mine from about 2005:

Clockwork Crock

A Clockwork Orange is the story, written in an invented slang of miscegenated Russian and Cockney, of a juvenile delinquent called Alex, who hands out beatings and rapes for kicks in between worshipping at the shrines of Ludwig V. and Wolfgang M. After many blood-stained adventures with his droogies, he is caught by the police and conditioned by government scientists to respond with nausea to the merest thought of violence. Unfortunately, because the films of concentration camps and Japanese atrocities with which they condition him are accompanied by classical music, he also responds with nausea to the merest snatch of Ludwig or Wolfgang.

The state then sees the error of its way and deconditions him, but although Alex is now free to continue his lawless – A-lex – ways, he discovers, in a closing scene cut from the first American edition, that he is growing up and just isn’t interested any more.

And with that, Burgess thought he had said something profound and important about free will and the dangers of the then-current behaviourist solutions to crime and deviance. He hadn’t. As a piece of experimental writing, this book is very clever and entertaining. As philosophy and ethics, it’s infantile. Burgess’s intent is summed up in what he said about the title: “I meant it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness.”

The mechanistic morality is that of behaviourism, which regards men as living machines that can be conditioned by pain and pleasure to behave in appropriate ways: to avoid bad and seek good. But as the prison chaplain says to the imprisoned Alex:

“The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

Burgess doesn’t seem to have noticed what he had been writing in the rest of the book. Why did Alex stop choosing violence? Because the thought of it made him sick. But why did Alex, before then, carry on choosing violence? Because the thought, and the fact of it, gave him enormous pleasure. And why was that? Had Alex chosen to receive pleasure from violence? Burgess doesn’t say, and the question doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.

Nor does the related question of why Alex is a young man. If free will is indeed this mysterious metaphysical entity floating free of the mechanistic, electro-chemical morality of the behaviourists, why is Alex a young man? Why does it matter that, as he grows up, he starts to lose interest in violence and think about starting a family?

When I read that ending as a very young man myself, I thought it was ridiculous: it spoilt the book. Alex should have carried on as he was, lawlessly flouting the rules of the society that had treated him so brutally. But when I’d grown up a little myself and I read it again, I saw that it was perfectly realistic – and it’s an interesting commentary on the maturity of American society that it was cut for that first American edition. Violent young hooligans, like the Teddy Boys Burgess was inspired by, do grow up and stop being violent, because they stop being young. In other words, their brains change. Burgess is happy to accept Alex’s brain being changed by age, but not to accept it being changed by the state, presumably because one is natural and implicit and the other artificial and explicit.

But both are beyond the control of the autonomous individual Burgess supposes Alex to be. What Burgess should have written the book about is whether the state has the right to do to an individual what nature does. But the state alters individuals by putting them in prison, so Burgess’s objection seems to be that the scientists of A Clockwork Orange alter prisoners efficiently and speedily. It might be a valid objection, if it were based on something other than a defence of free will. The chaplain says this to Alex too:

“What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.”

In fact, they’re neither deep nor hard, but they’re not answered by this book in either case and Burgess’s weak argument is not strengthened by hyperbole. Suppose that instead of nausea Alex had been conditioned to respond with boredom or indifference to the thought of violence. Suppose that classical music had not accompanied the films he was conditioned with. Unless Burgess is suggesting that beauty cannot exist without ugliness and pain, Alex’s before and after reactions to classical music are irrelevant.

Does he choose to listen to classical music as he chooses to be violent? But he listens to classical music because he gets pleasure from it, just as he commits violence because he gets pleasure from it. If he were indifferent to either he would not choose to indulge in it with the vigour and frequency that he does. In some very important ways we are machines, and Burgess’s title, like the book itself, is not the refutation of behaviourism that he supposes it is. Read it as fiction, not as philosophy, because as a thinker, Burgess was a very good writer.

The Scala Cinema. Long gone, much lamented. By Garry Guggan, TransVisceral C.E.O., among many others. He was a regular attendee at this London locus of the teratic and tenebrose. So he’s asked another regular attendee – Norman Foreman, B.A. – to compile a book of interviews and reminiscences for the benefit both of those who share fond memories of the Scala and of those who never had the chance to become acquainted with its unique mixture of the sleazy, the slimy and the sinister. As a taster for the book – due out next year – here are some extracts from an interview Norman has conducted with Phil Barbarelli, an actor from New York who was a dedicated member of the Scala Tribe…

Norman Foreman: The Scala has legendary status among keyly committed core components of the counter-cultural community. Can you explain what contributed to its feral appeal?

Phil Barbarelli: A trip to the Scala felt like a trip back to a 1950s 42nd Street “grind house” or ’60s Soho sleaze sinema or a below-the-Mason-Dixon-line drive-in or a back-room stag-film fest. It had a sticky floor, stale popcorn retro vibe that was catnip to outré film aficionados. It was a place where you could see an all-day festival of British nudie cuties and naturist films. Or a rare bargain-basement biker or slasher film. Where else would I have had the chance to meet the legendary Pamela Green or question the director of Tom Jones Meets Lady Godiva? Going to the Scala was a guilty pleasure. The only time I felt uncomfortable there was when they showed without warning a mercifully short bestiality film among some soft-core films. They should have warned us. I sensed that most of the audience felt that we had been compromised and our trust abused.

Norman Foreman: What was the Scala audience like?

Phil Barbarelli: The audience was mainly what were then (early ’90s) known as “slackers”. Hey, who else could afford to spend an entire workday in an itch house watching Grade-Z slasher films? Or spend an all-too-rare sunny Saturday in a smelly, dark room watching British naturist films? There were also out-of-work actors (is there another kind?), musicians and the occasional dirty-mac wearer. The latter were bound to be disappointed by the relatively tame material. And, I saw a few City Gents complete with bowler hats and rolled umbrellas.

The audience was almost entirely male with a few bored/bewildered chicks dragged along on dates. The behaviour was the same as you’d see in any cinema. But on special occasions, e.g. Q&A sessions or book-signings, people would be a bit chatty. But most folk were anxious to maintain a “hipper than thou” aloof demeanour. Did I dream it or did some of them watch the films with their sunglasses on? Most dressed in black or T-shirts decorated with the names of bands you never heard of.

Norman Foreman: You are of Italian heritage and had a Catholic upbringing. How far do you think this has fed into your purulent passion for the teratic and tenebrose?

Phil Barbarelli: Speak English! But, yes, Roman Catholicism does tend to warp a young man’s mind. It’s full of guts and gore and it taught us that sex was dirty while at the same time making us obsess about it. It was a nun who asked us at the age of seven if we ever had impure thoughts or had committed impure acts with members of our family or animals. Well, I certainly hadn’t thought about it until she gave me the idea. And, I’m happy to report that incest and bestiality remain outside my ken.

But, I was also influenced/damaged by seeing old-fashioned Coney Island freak shows. And, by growing up in the very lurid atmosphere of 1950s Brooklyn. Read Henry Miller and look at the photos of Weegee to get an idea. It was technicolor, violent, vibrant, funny, sexy, beautiful, ugly – all at once.

But, I find that kitsch and trash are often more entertaining and instructive than middle-brow crap. Case in point: Henry – Portrait of A Serial Killer is a more frightening, powerful and truthful film than The Silence of The Lambs. Guess which I saw at The Scala? So, I enjoy and continue to nurture my interest in all things off-beat. And, the Catholic rule to not look/read/listen to something spurs me to look/read/listen to anything I like. So there.

Norman Foreman: You mentioned seeing a genuine autopsy film on a big screen in NYC. Please say more.

Phil Barbarelli: A hipster cinema in Tribeca showed a film called Autopsy. It was a B&W film of an actual autopsy shot by one of the first “under-ground” filmmakers, whose name escapes me. He had a friend who worked in a NYC morgue and that friend arranged the filming with the stipulation that the corpse remain anonymous. In fact, the dead person may have been a “John Doe”. It was interesting to see how few of the hipsters lasted through the film. Several ran for the toilets, retching as they ran. Imagine if it had been in colour. The same thing happened at The Scala when it showed a double bill of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry. This was the un-edited version of Henry and not cleaned for general viewing.

Massacre was a giggle. Henry was truly terrifying. The “not so tough” trendies headed for the exit.

Norman Foreman: You’ve talked about the “Catholic gaze”. What about the “male gaze”? Didn’t you see something interesting at a strip-show?

Phil Barbarelli: I saw many interesting things at strip-shows. (Ba-da-boom.) I think you mean the demonstration of the male desire to see what he should not. I was at a strip-show on 42nd street in the era of the film Taxi Driver. NYC was at its sleaziest. The strippers would end their act by putting a dirty rug/mat on the front of the stage floor and lie down on it and spread their legs showing everything they had. You could see their tonsils. They would often masturbate or pretend to. Some would allow men to come up and taste their charms for an additional fee. This was a popular pastime for Japanese tourists.

But, directly upstage of them was a door leading to the dancers’ dressing room. Sometimes as a girl was downstage displaying her charms this door upstage would open. When it did, every man in the audience would take his eyes off the woman’s vagina to sneak a look at what he was not supposed to see in the back room.

Norman Foreman: How often in New York did you see films with gimmicks, like The Tingler?

Phil Barbarelli: My childhood (’50s and early ’60s) was the heyday of the gimmick films made by William Castle and others. I was too young to see House of Wax starring Vincent Price, which was the first major 3-D movie. But, my brother gave me his 3-D glasses and told me how things seemed to jump off the screen. There were also 3-D comic books that came with a set of glasses. Trying to read these comics without the glasses was an early psychedelic experience.

All the kids in my Brooklyn neighborhood would go to the “pitchers” on Saturdays to see triple bills with the main movie almost always a horror film.

We got the Hammer films and many low-budget British horror films – X – The Unknown, Horror of The Black Museum – “filmed in hypnovision”. This movie seriously terrorised a generation of children. It’s the only horror film I saw that I think should not have been shown to anyone under 18.

When the skeletons flew over our heads in The House on Haunted Hill we threw things at them. We wore special glasses to see the ghost in 13 Ghosts and we loved The Tingler.

In the late ’80s, an art house in Tribeca showed The Tingler with the original buzzers attached to the seats. They gave a very mild shock, akin to the joke hand-shake buzzers.

By coincidence, in 2013 I was in a terrible play in the West End that was supposed to be a comic homage to Castle and the gimmick horror films. We squirted the audience with “blood” in the dark and threw “insects” on them. My character was loosely based on Castle. I made an oblique reference to The Tingler. This line got a very few knowing laughs. It was obvious that this genre of gimmick film was not well known enough for a comic homage to work.